The Girl from Station X Read Online Free Page B

adults, except Nanny B, who is a long way upstairs,
bathing my baby brother, are looking for Raymond.
    I send Nicky along the corridor to find out what’s going on. I don’t want to go myself, I am scared, but when Nicky doesn’t return, I go anyway, to fetch him. I hear a
man’s voice – perhaps Mr Tash’s – say: ‘Raymond’s in the pool!’ He must mean the fishpond by the veranda. Nicky and I are sent back down the corridor.
    That evening my father comes into the schoolroom. He tells me: ‘Raymond’s gone to Jesus.’
    My father only ever uses the word ‘Jesus’ when swearing. I sense that he is performing a duty that he loathes. I say nothing. I tie Nicky to the piano with the piece of string I used
earlier to play horses. I intend to look after him, always.
    That night I go to bed in the narrow brown room that I’ve been put in at my grandmother’s. On the wall beside my bed, very close, are pictures of wild boars fighting. They look very
cruel. Someone has given me a rubber for my birthday and put one in for Raymond as well. Now it is
my
rubber. My mother does not come to say good night to me.
    My grandmother told me years later that it was Katherine, who had come to work at Knowle on my mother’s eleventh birthday and who remained at Knowle for fifty years, who
eventually found Raymond in the dark. ‘Poor Katie, with her stick-thin legs; she couldn’t swim!’ said my grandmother. My grandmother threw off her winter coat and dived in to save
her grandson, but it was too late.
    My aunt and her husband drove straight to Knowle from their Dorset home while my father drove through the dark from North Heath with my mother. He had sent his sister a telegram:
RAYMOND ACCIDENTALLY DROWNED
– as though he might have drowned on purpose! said my aunt, telling me the story years later. She added that, while my mother had
sat, completely frozen, unable to cry, my father drank a whole bottle of whisky and shouted at the vicar: ‘I don’t want my son in heaven, I want him down here!’
    The vicar’s wife, Veronica, came with her husband from the village for several evenings after that, and up to my bedroom to kiss me good night. I relished her soft skin and her embraces.
She was much younger than my mother. I don’t remember seeing my mother for days, maybe weeks, after Raymond’s accident.
    At last, Nicky and I were allowed to see her, and our baby brother was carried in. My mother was in bed, in the room which had been hers as a child. There were pink rosebuds on the wallpaper and
in the summer real roses pushed their way through the open windows. As I walked in I thought: ‘At least she’s got us.’
    One morning on the staircase at Knowle, my father pointed to his dark tie. ‘I’m wearing this for Raymond’s funeral.’
    I had not been invited. Raymond now belonged with the adults. He was more important to them than I was.
    Each day now at Knowle, I played with Nicky in my mother’s old schoolroom. I played with Nicky in our grandmother’s garden, and in the rhododendron bushes at the corner of her wood,
the place I called ‘Our Village’. I busied myself with my infant brother, pretending that I was his guardian, the only person left in the world to look after him. Sometimes I romped
with my father’s black dog Raven, half retriever and half Chesapeake Bay, the latter breed accounting for his slightly curly coat. Raven was dignified, old beyond his years, and I loved it
when I managed to get him to run up and down with me. He would often smile at me, crinkling up his mouth.
    We were sent to Ireland that Christmas to stay with Michael, the son of my grandmother’s sister Elisa, who had drowned in the sea in Italy; Michael, then an infant, and his father were
saved. Michael, a big bearded man, owned Raven’s brother, Drake, who was more lively than Raven. I played with him and he chewed a button off my duffel coat.
    I don’t remember missing Raymond. I do remember wishing